The Kurdish Key to the Middle East

The Kurds are already the key to keeping Iraq intact. When is it going to dawn on Washington that they are the key to solving several of the Middle East's other intractable problems?

by Dr. Jack Wheeler
September 28, 2006

Among the most fascinating folks in the world are people known as the Kurds. They are older than history. The Land of Kurda is mentioned in Sumerian clay tablets – the world's oldest writing – over 5,000 years ago. The Land of Kurda – Kurdistan – was ancient five millennia ago.

The Kurds had been living there for thousands of years before 3,000 BC – and they are still living there today, in the mountains of what is now northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey.

They number in the tens of millions – five million in Iraq, ten million in Iran, three million in Syria, between twenty and thirty million in Turkey. They are by far the largest ethnic group on earth without their own country.

This has always made them a threat to the countries that divide up their homeland of Kurdistan. Always. The Kurds have been fighting the Persians for 2,500 years, the Arabs for 1,300 years, the Turks for 500 years. Western governments l…